This project is
a natural complement to the work on the physical city in that it will
consider the setting where people in a virtual representation of a large
scale urban environment are looking out to the physical world: planning
their interactions with the physical world, or enjoying the virtual
representation of the physical world for its own sake, or inhabiting the
virtual because it is impractical to visit the real. The vision here is of
a living virtual urban environment with dynamic display and interaction
dependent on live feeds from the corresponding real environment. It will take as
its starting point previous work at UCL on
the construction of a model of much of London. There are several goals in
this project. The first is real-time interactive display of the model. The
second is improvement of photo-realistic display. The model is, of course,
that of a real city. However, the model is currently static, representing
the buildings and roads only. It does not represent the life of the city,
the transport situation, the weather, and facilities at any moment in
time. The goal is to make the model persistent, to take real-time feeds
and update the model to reflect the changing state of the environment. A
further goal is to allow people immersed in the model to carry out
functions that are relevant to their activities in every day life:
planning a journey, visiting a hotel and inspecting its facilities,
meeting other people in virtual situ prior to really meeting them there,
and so on. The model will be populated by agents to act as guides through
the system, and present the interconnections between the real and the
virtual that will be based on a common information model explored through
the support for an artifact collection. The results of this work will feed
back into embedded devices research challenges
|
